Is there such a thing as personal nonfiction?

Nonfiction exists as a category, of course.  I'm reading Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea, about the 16th century struggle in the Mediterranean between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, and have no reason to doubt Crowley's account of the siege of Malta or the fall of Cyprus.

But personal memoirs are also fall into "nonfiction".  That is starting to seem much more dubious.  Many supposed memoirs (James Frey, Holocaust memoirs of being raised by wolves or fed by girls throwing apples across the fence, J T LeRoy, etc.) have recently been shown to be partly or largely fictional.  I don't think the truth-quality of memoirs has dropped.  I think the revelation of their falseness has been made easier.

One of my favorite blogs, prairiemary, recently mentioned something that has been out for a few years that, I will admit, did disturb me.  On Thursday she mentioned that the opening of Annie Dillard's memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where her tomcat comes through her window at night with bloody feet and leaves bloody pawprints on the bare skin of her chest didn't happen to her, but to a male student of hers, who gave her permission to use it as her own.

That book is wonderfully written, but I'd always doubted the "some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood".  My body?  Covered?  Some mornings?  I'd buy some blood on a nightgown once, and some dead animals (as Mary mentions) at other times.  The most common way memoirists distort events is to take the occasional or unique and make it habitual and characteristic of a period.

So:  did I "always doubt" it?  Or did it just occur to me, thinking back?  Here's the real problem of truth-in-memoir.  Even I can't quite be sure.

Now I know it didn't happen to Dillard.  And, most likely, it didn't happen to her student either, at least not exactly as described.  And how voluntary was the transfer of the story from student to teacher?

Whenever something like this comes out, there are those who say it doesn't matter, that they responded to the quality of the prose, or the psychological truth.  I can never figure out what these people are talking about.

I tell lies.  That's what my books are.  They are not true.  They didn't happen, and, in fact, could not happen.  I like to think that there is quality prose and psychological truth in what I write.

But it matters if something happened, or if it didn't.  The Turkish fleet really was repulsed at Malta, and really did conquer Cyprus.  Discovering that the dramatic defense of the fortress of St. Elmo at Malta was a fictional creation intended to boost the spirit of a beleaguered Europe would meaningfully change our perception of 16th century history.

Maybe that doesn't matter to some people.  It does to me.

The Ultimate Critic

I'm currently reading Rodric Braithwaite's excellent Moscow 1941, an account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union with a focus of the life of the city itself.

Russia had been in the grips of the Terror since the start of the big purges in 1937:

In the four years before the war more than thirty-two thousand people died at the hands of the secret police in Moscow and the surrounding Region.

Two corpse disposal zones had been set up outside the city, one at Butovo, the other at Kommunarka.  Most of the elite, including artists and writers, were killed at the NKVD dacha at Kommunarka.  And it's here that I learned of a figure I had not heard of before, but about whom I intend to learn more, Vasili Blokhin:

Many of these executions were carried out by a squad under the command of Vasili Blokhin, a specialist in such matters.  Blokhin is said to have personally killed the theatre director Meyerhold, the writer Isaak Babel and Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

Blokhin also took a key role in the 1940 Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps, "wearing a leather apron and cap and long leather gloves":  he apparently carried out many of the killings of the Polish POWs personally, with a German Walther pistol he favored because it didn't jam when hot, at Mednoe, north of Moscow.

How is it that Blokhin is not better known?  The winnowing of writers in those years was brutal:  first silenced, then tortured and killed.  And if Blokhin did indeed carry out the killings personally, he was probably the last person to see them before they died.  Whether they saw him, I don't know.